[en] A few tips on writing for a blog: don't advertise, be interesting, use your authentic voice, remember the media is conversational, and be a real person writing something. This is not easy to do if you've been formatted to spew commercial copy or marketing-speak, but it can be learned. Learning requires exercise, and often help from others (peers or a trainer).

I got fed up with [my professional site](http://stephanie-booth.com) being so out-of-date, so I [archived the 2006 version](http://2006.stephanie-booth.com) and threw together a few new pages with WordPress.

I need a design. I’d like to use [Sandbox](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/the-hatomisation-of-ctts/) or [K2](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/k2/) as a base, so that everything is nice and [microformatty](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/using-hatom/). I’ve had a look at K2 styles, but haven’t yet found a nice browsable directory of them.

In addition to that, my pro site isn’t a blog — I’m just using wordpress because it’s a nice way to manage the static pages and the design. I’d like to add a [big footer, Hemingway-style](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/10/13/large-footer-lust/) — has anybody done a mod of K2 with a sidebar **and** a large footer?

I’m also totally open to suggestions regarding the design of the new site. I don’t have any strong desires apart for pink, of course. If you’re motivated to create a style or mod for me, I’d be willing to part with some cash or buy stuff of a wishlist.

Here is an explanation of how I set up WordPress to manage my bilingual weblog. I give all the code I used to do it, and announce some of the things I’d like to implement. A “Multilingual blogging” TopicExchange channel is now open.

My weblog is bilingual, and has been since November 2000. Already then, I knew that I wouldn’t be capable of producing a site which duplicates every entry in two languages.

I think this would defeat the whole idea of weblogging: lowering the “publication barrier”. I feel like writing something, I quickly type it out, press “Publish”, and there we are. Imposing upon myself to translate everything just pushes it back up again. I have seen people try this, but I have never seen somebody keep it up for anything nearing four years (this weblog is turning four on July 13).

This weblog is therefore happily bilingual, as I am — sometimes in English, sometimes in French. This post is about how I have adapted the blogging tools I use to my bilingualism, and more importantly, how I can accommodate my monolingual readers so that they also feel comfortable here.

First thing to note: although weblogging tools are now ready to be used by people speaking a variety of languages (thanks to a process named “localization”), they remain monolingual. Language is determined at weblog-level.

With Movable Type, I used categories to emulate post-level language awareness. This wasn’t satisfying at all: I ended up with to monstrous categories, Français and English, which didn’t help keep rebuild times down.

Before I really got started doing the exciting stuff, I made a quick change to the WordPress admin interface. If I was going to be adding a “language” custom field to each and every post of mine, I didn’t want to be doing it with the (imho) rather clumsy “Custom Fields” form.

In edit.php, just after the categorydivfieldset, I inserted the following:

I also make sure the language of the date matches the language of the post. For this, I added a new function, the_time_lg(), to my-hacks.php. I then use the following code to print the date: <?php the_time_lg($the_language); ?>.

Can more be done? Yes! I know I have readers who are not bilingual in the two languages I use. I know that at times I write a lot in one language and less in another, and my “monolingual” readers can get frustrated about this. During a between-session conversation at BlogTalk, I suddenly had an idea: I would provide an “other language” excerpt for each of my posts.

I’ve been writing excerpts for each of my posts for the last six months now, and it’s not something that raises the publishing barrier for me. Quickly writing a sentence or two about my post in the “other language” is something I can easily do, and it will at least give my readers an indication about what is said in the posts they can’t understand. This is the first post I’m trying this with.

So, as I did for language above, I added another “custom field” to my admin interface (in edit-form.php). Actually, I didn’t stop there. I also added the field for the excerpt to the “simple controls” posting page that I use (set that in Options > Writing), and another field for keywords, which I also store for each post as meta data. Use at your convenience:

I inserted these fields just below the “content” fieldset, and styled the #keywords and #other-excerpttextarea fields in exactly the same way as #excerpt. Practical translation: open wp-admin.css, search for “excerpt”, and modify the rules so that they look like this:

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, what else can be done? Well, I’ve got some ideas. Mainly, I’d like visitors to be able to add “en” or “fr” at the end of any url to my weblog, and that would automatically filter out all the content which is not in that language — maybe using the trick Daniel describes? In addition to that, it would also change the language of what I call the “page furniture” — titles, footer, and even (let’s by ambitious) category names. Adding language sensitivity to trackbacks and comments could also be interesting.